Fairy Ring Mushrooms

A Portal at Your Doorstep

Marasmius oreades

Fungi are like those dinosaur-shaped sponges of nineties fame. They don’t grow as plants and animals do – by cell multiplication – instead, they sprout from the mycelium as fully formed, tiny mushrooms. Imagine tiny little mushrooms poised like empty water balloons lined up beside the kitchen sink. They wait beneath the soil, whispering among themselves as they yearn for rain. They’ll use the force of water filling their cells to burst into our world.

As I wrote this chapter, I took breaks to read Underland by Robert MacFarlane. A stunning book that transports the reader into the spaces deep within and underneath our own. Naturally, it had a section on fungi. I scribbled down many standout phrases to quote. One in particular stuck in my mind like tree resin on a fingertip:

“[Fungi] do strange things to time. Because it is not easy to say where a fungus ends or begins, when it is born or when it dies. To fungi, our world of light and air is their underland, into which th…